Song and dance man Gene Kelly stars in a rare dramatic turn
in this
pallid political thriller set in a devastated postwar Germany. It's
shot
in black and white and on location in Germany and Austria, giving it an
authentic feel. Austrian-born Andrew Marton ("King Solomon's Mines"/"It
Happened in Athens"/"The Thin Red Line") sluggishly helms it after
returning
to his native country for the first time in twenty years since fleeing
from Hitler; it's weakly written by Jerry Davis and is based on the
novel
by Lawrence P. Bachmann. It's a fictionalized story based on actual
news
events and public documents, that tells of the U.S. Army's hunt for
gold
smuggled out of Germany by former Nazi officers.

Capt. Jeff Eliot (Gene Kelly) is a navigation instructor
who returns
on vacation to Munich in 1947 to pay back the favor of a German family
who saved his life during WW II when they rescued him after his plane
was
shot down over Munich. He finds out that their home was bombed out and
that only Lehrt's teenage daughter Wilhelmina (Pier Angeli) is alive,
as
her parents were killed in an allied bombing raid. Unknown to Jeff is
that
Wilhelmina is on a list of bar girls who are involved in the black
market.
With the help of his hotel roommate, Lt. Parker (Richard Egan), Jeff
tracks
down Willie, her name for short, working as a hostess at the seedy
Silhouette
club. After overcoming her initial bitterness, they go on a Christmas
holiday
to be in Salzburg with old family friends--the Keiglers--with a car he
specially purchases for the drive. He soon learns from Willie that she
used him to smuggle camera lenses and needles across the border, but
later
learns from intelligence officer Col. James Terry (Richard Rober) that
she's involved in a much bigger smuggling operation. That Heisemann
(Claus
Clausen), the Silhouette's pianist, runs the smuggling ring and is the
neo-Nazi leader of a ring that is smuggling the hidden fortune in gold
the Nazis stole from their concentration camp victims and obtained from
other sources to be used to revitalize the party after their defeat.
When
Jeff is sure that Willie is involved, he agrees to help the colonel
stop
the ring. After another trip to the Keiglers with Willie, Jeff searches
the parked car in the garage and Keigler tries to shoot him. But the
shot
hits the car bumper and it reveals where the gold is hidden. After
escaping
from Keigler and getting back on the autobahn with Willie, who swears
she
didn't know about the gold, their car breaks down and they are taken
prisoners
by the Nazi gang. When Jeff realizes they both will be killed he
initiates
an escape, but Willie gets wounded and is left on the road. Fortunately
Lt. Parker followed Heisemann when he left his club in his Mercedes,
and
calls for medical help. It ends after a high-speed chase on the
autobahn,
as the ring leader is cornered by Jeff, Parker and several M.P.s atop
Berchtesgaden,
the Brown House mountain retreat in the Alps where the Führer
organized
the Nazi party.

Everything about it seemed routine and tepid, including the
unconvincing
romance between Kelly and Angeli. Easily the best part of the film was
viewing the European locations.